Stalwart v1.0: The Fastest Mail Server on the Planet | Hacker News Reader

Stalwart v1.0: The Fastest Mail Server on the Planet

stalw.art

74 pointsStalwartLabs30 comments

I really like running rust infra projects, and have been using stalwart for a long time. Its been excellent for self hosting email on a small hetzner instance. Highly recommended, and happy to see the rare 1.x release in the rust ecosystem. Wrote a bit about my experiences here: https://lindfors.no/blog/self-hosted-newsletter/

Have you had any issues with deliverability? Whenever I consider self-hosting email I think about the number of comments I've seen on HN saying don't.

Same. I've been a fastmail user for years and JMAP is a must-have for me now. But infra is so much easier to manage than it used to be, and I see projects like this and I'm thinking it could just be my own affordable box in the cloud now (that I could use for other servers as well).

Whenever your email doesn't get delivered, you just resend it from your Gmail account. Receiving always works.

I've been self-hosting my email for years. Something that wasn't obvious to me in the beginning is that you can separate sending and receiving: host the receiving yourself and use a service for sending (e.g. Mailchimp, Sendgrid etc.). That can address many concerns.

I did that in the beginning but later set up my own relay hosted at Hetzner. I could do it on my receiving server (a PC in my house) but I don't have a static IP and IP reputation is a big deal in email deliverability.

I do very occasionally get sent to spam but it's fairly rare and I'm not sure my free Gmail account was any better.

I've also been self hosting for a couple decades, and I've taken this approach a step further. I self-deliver to most destinations, but for a while there was one destination (a regional ISP's mail server) that would not accept my emails. My solution was to route _only_ emails for that destination through MailGun. The volume was so low that I stayed within Mailgun's free tier.

Even a custom domain can be pain. I have an xyz domain and my mails usually land in the spam folder when I send from it. If you don't have enough volume you might have trouble as well.

Running a stalwart mail server since a few months for all my personal mails. I have auto dns configured and let stalwart handle all the dns stuff. Never had any issues. Last thing I needed to fix for perfect spam recognition: Switching from systemd resolve to unbound for dns resolution, which enables spamhouse & co. spam checking in stalwart. Before I had quit a few false-positives and false negatives. Switching to unbound fixed this.

I just wish there would be more pure JMAP email clients. But maybe soon!

EM Mail has worked pretty well for me.

https://github.com/bonjourservices/awesome-jmap#clients

Pretty much all of that I had never heard of and many of them looked decent so I figured I would share.

Check bulwark mail: https://bulwarkmail.org

It already has stalwart 1.0.0 support ...

From their website: "Webmail for Stalwart Mail Server.

Bulwark puts mail, calendar, contacts and files in one browser client that talks JMAP to your own server."

Thanks. I am already using this, it seems to be the best so far. But I feel something is still missing from there by the usability aspect. It also uses NextJS which I don't know what to think about...

Disclosure: I build Keenrig, a self-hosted app platform, and I'm considering packaging Stalwart. For people running it: what should a one-click install get right (auto-DNS, cert handling, backups of the data dir) so it doesn't feel worse than a manual setup

I have recently started using Gridlink for JMAP interaction on Android: https://f-droid.org/packages/app.gridlink

This looks great. Quite new one, hopefully will be maintained.

you mentioned a secrets vault in the blog post. Is there something specific you like? I'm looking to eventualy move off bitwarden.

I also want to set up a mail server, but when setting it up, I heard that it needs to be authenticated so the mail doesn't go to spam and can be used as a service

Have there been independent third party code and network penetration tests performed on Stalwart and what were the findings?

https://stalw.art/blog/security-audit-2025/ros-report.pdf

Nice. Curious if they will also let Mythos and related LLM's also take a pass at it.

I really want to give this a try for a backup to my main email (hosted on fastmail), but a couple of those enterprise features are things I'd want to really try out as a solo hoster (AI Sieve and masked addresses). I can't justify paying $50/year for those though. :|

Well, I know what I'm upgrading tonight. (I didn't see any mention of this in the blog post, but they also implemented batch-upload for the vandelay tool, so exporting your archive into a new Stalwart server is much faster now, too!)

Just yesterday I bought an enterprise license for my personal use because I felt like supporting a project that's doing many things just right!

Stalwart is a really impressive piece of software.

This is an awesome add to my list of server software that runs on Windows Server. I love when devs write for Windows Server.

Why? Is it some form of Stockholm syndrome?

Amazing engineering work! Bought a license just to support it as well.

Can't wait for webmail next!

Couple with stalwart I have been using Bulkwark : bulwarkmail.org/

Been running it on a small box and the thing I appreciate most is that it's one process instead of postfix plus dovecot plus rspamd glued together with my own mediocre unit files.

Fair point, more relevant than speed tbh

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